Comment by ecliptik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecliptik | Hacker News Reader

The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard [1].

Ballard is science fiction in the sense he explores inner space instead of outer space.

Some are kind of eh, and ones that have really stuck out for me,

"Concentration City" - a giant infinitely expanding city ala Dark City or Blame!.

"Studio Five, The Stars" - poetry is written by machines and only eccentrics write their own. Think AI generation of art but in 1961.

"The Subliminal Man" - government uses subliminal messages to promote mindless consumerism - They Live but 1963.

"Billennium" - Earth is vastly overpopulated and any semblance of personal space or privacy is non-existent.

"The Garden of Time" - allegory of never ceasing approach of time no matter what you do to defend yourself from it.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Short_Stories_o...

That collection has a bunch of great stories. Some I particularly like:

* "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" — shades of Lem, Borges, and Harlan Ellison as a crew explores an apparently infinite construct.

* "A Question of Re-Entry" — post-colonialism á la Heart of Darkness by way of science fiction allegory; a beautiful companion to his apocalypse series (of which the best is The Crystal World; there's another story here, "The Illuminated Man", that Ballard used as the basis for that book).

* "The Drowned Giant" — an odd fable about giant found washed up on a beach and how a cottage industry of scavenging grows around it. (There's a decent animated version of this story in Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots.")

* "Dream Cargoes" — I guess I like Ballard the most when he's off in some tropical environment where nature is doing weird things, and this is one of them, and also because it's implied to be set on Vieques, an island that I love very much.

There are a few duds, but what's interesting is the wide span of Ballard's focus. He doesn't do one type of story, but many. (Unfortunately his later career could have done with more of this type of imaginative variance; he spent his last couple of decades writing at least three (four, if you count Running Wild) about rich gated communities hiding dark psychological secrets, and they were not very good.)

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